Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., requested
earmarks for at least ten companies that have been donors to the
lawmaker in this election cycle. Five of those companies have been
long-term contributors to Shelby.

Shelby, who is on the Senate
appropriations committee, requested more than $54.3 million for these
ten companies and has received more than $69,000 in campaign funds from
their employees and PACs since 2008, a quick analysis of his online
earmark requests using Sunlight’s newest tool Poligraft.com shows.

Employees
of Radiance Technologies, for which Shelby requested $5 million in
earmarks, have given the lawmaker more $19,750 in campaign cash in the
last cycle. The company, based in Huntsville, Alabama, develops
anti-missile technology.

Although the online earmark requests of several lawmakers the Reporting
Group researched using Poligraft returned lists of earmark recipients that had also contributed to the campaigns of their benefactors in Congress, Shelby stood out as one of the few
that had as many matches, with quite a few that had given to his
campaign over a long period of time.

For example, Radiance
Technologies’ employees and political action committee together have
given Shelby more than $63,000 over the last decade. Another company
that received an earmark last year and is on the request list for 2011,
Colsa Corporation, has given one quarter of all their contributions to
Shelby.

According to a study by
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Shelby, who is up
for re-election in November, has a long history of doling out earmarks to
companies whose employees and lobbyists donate to his re-election
committees especially to companies that have hired his former staffers
as lobbyists in recent years. The report found that there were at least
eight of his former staffers who, after leaving government, went on to create or be part of Washington
lobby shops that in turn worked on appropriating $267 million in
earmarks for their clients since 2008. Also, these newly minted
lobbyists and their clients donated almost $1 million to Shelby’s
committee and Political Action Committee.